The advent of cellular telephone heralds a new phase of two-way portable communication. However, while cellular telephone provides portable two-way communication, it brings a high economic cost for the convenience of being accessible in most geographic locations. Furthermore, because users of the cellular telephones have to pay the air time cost for all calls to and from their cellular telephones, there is no way to prevent indiscriminate calls apart from restricting the disclosure of their cellular telephone numbers or turning off their telephones which may cause them to miss important calls.
One attempt to solve this problem was to combine a cellular telephone with a selective call receiver (pager). With the combined cellular telephone-selective call receiver, the user may widely distribute the number for her selective call receiver while restricting the number to her cellular telephone. When paged, the user can then determine, from the telephone number or any accompanying messages, whether to call back on her cellular telephone. The combination cellular telephone/selective call receiver has separate receiving circuits so both receivers may operate, i.e., receive messages independent of each other or even simultaneously. Unfortunately, conventional cellular telephone has a limited power supply and under normal operating conditions is unable to provide a "talk-time" long enough for most users. The limited power supply of the battery is exacerbated when the cellular telephone is combined with the selective call receiver because both devices place a higher demand for power on the battery which already has an inadequately short "talk-time."
Furthermore, even with the combination cellular telephone/selective call receiver, the user may not be able to easily identifier the caller from the telephone number received on the selective call receiver. Also, requiring the user to restrict her telephone number defeats the purpose of owning a cellular telephone. Therefore, what is needed is a method and an apparatus for enabling a user to enter messages, annotations, or commands to associate with the telephone numbers of a caller, or to transmit a non-voice type message from a cellular telephone.